A Great Article we found, Listing Angie’s Rules for a Successful Yard Sale:
1) Your lawn is not a store. If I can get it new for pennies more, you have priced it too high. Most items should be 25 cents to 3 dollars. Furniture should be $5 (side tables, wooden rocking chairs, book shelves) to $15 (dressers, desks, upholstered chairs, children’s furniture).
2) “Antiques Road Show” is not filming in your driveway. Your mother got that jewelry box in a swap meet in the 1970’s, so please refrain from telling anyone it’s “Victorian”.
3) Your lawn is also not the newest “Bob’s Discount Furniture” location. If I wanted to spend $50-$100 on a side table, I would have gone indoors to somewhere with a return policy.
4) Dirty Shoes? Really?!?! Please do not make me look at your 5 year-old flip-flops that have seen the beach more than I have. It only makes us both look sad.
5) Clean (or at the very least hose off!) the items you want to sell. I won’t notice that fabulous silver serving tray if it looks like it has spent a decade in the bowels of your basement. Polish, please! If it is crystal, I want to be blinded by the sun glinting off its facets as I walk by!!! Also, there is no money in a high chair with crusted Gerber Stage 2 Carrots from 1987 on the tray- which brings me to my next rule…
6) High chairs, car seats, infant swings and bouncy seats should be no more than 3-5 years old (and the car seat has an expiration date…find it. If it passed, kick yourself for not selling it sooner and move on).
A lot can happen in that time in regard to safety standards. Don’t even let me see a single thing in a neon color…it’s a dead giveaway that the thing isn’t even from the past 2 decades. Trash it or find a relative you can’t stand to pass it on to.
7) Make my life easier- do not stack boxes of items on top of each other and expect me to rifle through them. All the blood rushing to my head from bending over only makes me think more clearly about how worthless your things are. Lay out items in a single layer on a table or hanging rack. Put similar items together. Organization is the key to looking like you are having a yard sale, and not looking like you are just taking out the trash (and I have been to yard sales where I honestly was not sure which was the case).
8) Let’s remember our goal here, shall we? It is NOT to make a huge profit. If this were that profitable a venture, no one would show up at the office Monday morning, and we would all be living off the profits of Great Nana’s barware. Your REAL goal is to clear out all the junk that the Fire Department would probably deem too hazardous to keep stacked in your home anyways!
9) Be Zen about it. Let it go, for much, much, much less than you paid for it. If someone drove to your front patch of grass at the crack of dawn to buy your old blender for 25 cents, know that it is going to a good home. Don’t refuse offers for less, because at the end of the day, it is YOU who has to drag your dirty shoe collection back into your house…and NOTHING in life is sadder.
10) Have fun
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